Tahiti, "Finest Island in the World"
white frangipani, pandanus, mango, and
breadfruit to the blue sweep of Miatavai Bay
and the curved arm of Point Venus, with the
white lighthouse at its green tip. On the left,
beyond the reef, the scalloped outline of
Moorea rests on a cobalt sea.
On the slope below the house, overlooking
the view he loved best, lies James Norman
Hall. A bronze plaque bears this adaptation
of verses he wrote as a boy of 12 in Iowa:
Look to the Northward, stranger,
Just over the hillside there,
Have you in your travels seen
A land more passingfair?
Nick Rutgers and I took his motor launch
one day to examine the anchorages of Bligh
and his contemporaries. As we drove along
the coast west from Point Venus, a squall
darkened the horizon. Against the blue-black
sky a swelling lenticular green wave, fringed
with livid white, curled in slow motion along
the reef, hung motionless for a fraction, then
shattered itself to death on the coral wall.
Using the navigators' logs, Captain Donald
Maclntyre of the Royal Navy had plotted on
my chart of Matavai the anchorages of.Wallis,
Cook, and Bligh (chart, page 5). When the
squall passed, we raced in Nick's white Glass
par boat past the headland of Taharaa, the
One Tree Hill of Cook, and toward Point
Venus. A peculiar recurrent hump in the
smooth water of the bay marked Dolphin
Bank, where Wallis had run aground in 1767.
I dived with an Aqua-Lung on the bank
and near the shore, but found nothing. Any
thing that fell or was jettisoned from the
ships, if it is still there, must be buried under
a thick layer of sand and silt.
What had brought the 18th-century ex
plorers here principally was the search for
Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown
Southern Land. As far back as the time of the
ancient Greeks, some thinkers, at least, knew
that the world was round; they had even
measured its diameter. Down through the
KODACHROME(BELOW) AND HS EKTACHROME(C) NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICSOCIETY